Describing a stage performance in which Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) played the heroine, Van Veen mentions an old nurse in Eskimo's boots:
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Eskimo boots are made of felt. In his memoir note Dama s lornetom ("The Lady with a Lorgnette," 1925) Sergey Yesenin describes his first visit to the salon of Merezhkovski and Hippius in Petrograd, in March 1915, and says that Hippius looked at him through her lorgnette and mockingly asked him "what strange gaiters are you wearing [Esenin, who just came to Petrograd from his native village near Ryasan, wore a hunter's felt boots]?":
В газете «Ecler» Мережковский называл меня хамом, называла меня Гиппиус альфонсом, за то, что когда-то я, пришедший из деревни, имел право носить валенки.
— Что это на Вас за гетры? — спросила она, наведя лорнет.
Я ей ответил:
«— Это охотничьи валенки.
— Вы вообще кривляетесь.»
Потом Мережковский писал: «Альфонс, пьяница, большевик!»
А я ему отвечал устно: «Дурак, бездарность!»
In Chapter One (XX: 3-4) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Onegin at a theater trains his double lorgnette upon the loges of strange ladies:
Все хлопает. Онегин входит,
Идет меж кресел по ногам,
Двойной лорнет скосясь наводит
На ложи незнакомых дам;
Все ярусы окинул взором,
Всё видел: лицами, убором
Ужасно недоволен он;
С мужчинами со всех сторон
Раскланялся, потом на сцену
В большом рассеянье взглянул,
Отворотился - и зевнул,
И молвил: «Всех пора на смену;
Балеты долго я терпел,
Но и Дидло мне надоел».5
All clap as one. Onegin enters:
he walks — on people's toes — between the stalls;
askance, his double lorgnette trains
upon the loges of strange ladies;
he has scanned all the tiers;
he has seen everything; with faces, garb,
he's dreadfully displeased;
with men on every side
he has exchanged salutes; then at the stage
in great abstraction he has glanced,
has turned away, and yawned,
and uttered: “Time all were replaced;
ballets I long have suffered,
but even of Didelot I've had enough.”5
5. A trait of chilled sentiment worthy of Childe Harold. The ballets of Mr. Didelot are full of liveliness of fancy and extraordinary charm. One of our romantic writers found in them much more poetry than in the whole of French literature. (Pushkin's note)
The title of Yesenin's memoir note is a play on Chekhov's Dama s sobachkoy ("The Lady with the Lapdog," 1899). In his letters from Siberia to his family Chekhov (who was on his way to Sakhalin Island, the site of penal colony in the Imperial Russia) invariably addresses his family members druz'ya moi tungusy (my Tungus friends). The allusion is to the Tungus mentioned by Pushkin in the third stanza of his poem Ya pamyatnik sebe vozdvig (Exegi monumentum, 1836):
Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворный,
К нему не заростет народная тропа,
Вознесся выше он главою непокорной
Александрийского столпа.
Нет, весь я не умру — душа в заветной лире
Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит —
И славен буду я, доколь в подлунном мире
Жив будет хоть один пиит.
Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой,
И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык,
И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикой
Тунгуз, и друг степей калмык.
И долго буду тем любезен я народу,
Что чувства добрые я лирой пробуждал,
Что в мой жестокой век восславил я Свободу
И милость к падшим призывал.
Веленью божию, о муза, будь послушна,
Обиды не страшась, не требуя венца,
Хвалу и клевету приемли равнодушно,
И не оспоривай глупца.
"I've set up to myself a monument
not wrought by hands. The public path to it
will not grow weedy. Its unyielding head
soars higher than the Alexandrine column."
"No, I’ll not wholly die. My soul in the sacred lyre
Is to survive my dust and flee decay;
And I’ll be famed while there remains alive
In the sublunar world at least one poet."
"Tidings of me will cross the whole great Rus,
and name me will each tribe existing there:
proud scion of Slavs, and Finn, and the now savage
Tungus, and - friend of steppes - the Kalmuck."
"And to the nation long shall I be dear
for having with my lyre evoked kind feelings,
exalted friedom in my cruel age
and called for mercy to the downfallen."
To God’s command, O Muse, obedient be,
offends not dreading, and no wreath demanding;
accept indifferently praise and slander,
and do not contradict a fool.
At the end of his poem Kakoe sdelal ya durnoe delo… (“What is the evil deed I have committed?" 1959) VN says that a Russian branch's shadow shall be playing upon the marble of his hand:
Какое сделал я дурное дело,
и я ли развратитель и злодей,
я, заставляющий мечтать мир целый
о бедной девочке моей?
О, знаю я, меня боятся люди,
и жгут таких, как я, за волшебство,
и, как от яда в полом изумруде,
мрут от искусства моего.
Но как забавно, что в конце абзаца,
корректору и веку вопреки,
тень русской ветки будет колебаться
на мраморе моей руки.
What is the evil deed I have committed?
Seducer, criminal – is this the word
for me who set the entire world a-dreaming
of my poor little girl?
Oh, I know well that I am feared by people:
They burn the likes of me for wizard wiles
and as of poison in a hollow smaragd
of my art die.
Amusing, though, that at the last indention,
despite proofreaders and my age's ban,
a Russian branch's shadow shall be playing
upon the marble of my hand.
VN’s footnote: Lines 1–4. The first strophe imitates the beginning of Boris Pasternak’s poem in which he points out that his notorious novel “made the whole world shed tears over the beauty of [his] native land.”
Eugene and Lara (the trashy ephemeron in which Marina plays the heroine) seems to be a cross between Pushkin's EO and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel known on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor (a book that Blanche, a French handmaid at Ardis, is reading), Klara Mertvago and Mertvago forever.
Describing Kim Beauharnais's album, Van mentions the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper:
Another girl (Blanche!) stooping and squatting exactly like Ada (and indeed not unlike her in features) over Van’s valise opened on the floor, and ‘eating with her eyes’ the silhouette of Ivory Revery in a perfume advertisement. Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797-1883). (2.7)
In Chapter Eight (XLVI: 13-14) of EO Tatiana, as she speaks to Onegin, mentions a cross and the shade of branches over the grave of her poor nurse:
"А мне, Онегин, пышность эта,
Постылой жизни мишура,
Мои успехи в вихре света,
Мой модный дом и вечера,
Что в них? Сейчас отдать я рада
Всю эту ветошь маскарада,
Весь этот блеск, и шум, и чад
За полку книг, за дикий сад,
За наше бедное жилище,
За те места, где в первый раз,
Онегин, видела я вас,
Да за смиренное кладбище,
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной нянею моей..."
“But as to me, Onegin, this magnificence,
a wearisome life's tinsel, my successes
in the world's vortex,
my fashionable house and evenings,
what do I care for them?... At once I'd gladly
give all the frippery of this masquerade,
all this glitter, and noise, and fumes,
for a shelfful of books, for a wild garden,
for our poor dwelling,
for those haunts where for the first time,
Onegin, I saw you,
and for the humble churchyard where
there is a cross now and the shade
of branches over my poor nurse."